Well-loved urban parks historically have served as community centers. With more than 100,000 public park facilities scattered throughout neighborhoods and cities in the United States, urban parks have the potential benefit of fostering community and providing kids and adults with a place to socialize, exercise, play, and connect with the outdoors. As one City Lab article reports, urban parks are, “an ideal place for Americans to meet the national recommendations for physical activity (an hour a day for youth and a 150 minutes a week for adults),” though, in more recent years, parks are struggling to fulfill this potential.

Solar energy usage is on the rise nationwide as the technology becomes more efficient and cost effective. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), renewable energy sources accounted for almost two-thirds of net new power capacity around the world in 2016, with solar energy expanding faster than any other fuel source to surpass the net growth in coal for the first time in history.

“More than one million known species of plants and animals [exist in the world’s oceans], and scientists say there may be as many as nine million species we haven’t discovered yet” writes Discovery Education. These astonishing numbers grow even higher if we consider all the aquatic life in the world’s rivers, seas, lakes, and swamps. But despite this wealth of life, around “2,300 species are listed as endangered or threatened” according to NOAA Fisheries. This number is likely to grow as the impact of human activity on aquatic habitats worsens. Our oceans are polluted and often dangerous for the wildlife that once enjoyed their bounty, with around “5.25 trillion pieces of plastic debris in the ocean as of 2015” according to National Geographic.